Clean up own backyard says Pat Dodson

Tony Stephens

The Age, November 5, 2008

AUSTRALIA was trying to strut the international stage, talking about improving the world, when problems needed fixing in our backyard, Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson said yesterday.

Australia risked being condemned as a pariah nation unless it ratified the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights, passed last year, he said.

"We don't come to the table with clean hands," he said. "We behave schizophrenically. Internationally, we present a front about Australia as a tolerant nation, about mateship and the land of the fair go. But domestically we don't acknowledge that we are swimming in a backwater because we haven't advanced our social discourse on change."

Mr Dodson was speaking before his delivery tonight of the Sydney Peace Prize Lecture and his receipt of the 2008 prize tomorrow night from the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

He said the nation would lose absolutely if the riches of one of the world's oldest living cultures were squandered, abused or simply denied.

"We have had opportunities to address this: Mabo, Wik, the report of the stolen generations, the royal commission into deaths in custody, the reconciliation process itself, the national apology in Canberra. But we keep dropping the ball."

Of government intervention in indigenous communities, he asked: "Do you want the army, police or bureaucrats taking control of people's lives, or to work out a way that involves Aboriginal leadership, who could then collaborate with everything else?"

The problems in remote Australia were a failure of the federal system of government: "In the Kimberley, we are controlled by people in Perth and Canberra." Investment should be in the human capital of health, education and cultural values rather than controlling mechanisms.

Mr Dodson is co-convenor, with former West Australian governor John Sanderson, of The Australian Dialogue, which aims to move on from the apology. Governor-General Quentin Bryce gave her support last week.

Pat Dodson was seen as the father of reconciliation before the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, when then prime minister John Howard took water from Aboriginal elders to his lips.

However, he fell out with the Howard government and then focused his efforts in the Kimberley. Now he expects to return to more prominence.

"We seem to be stuck in a mentality of interventionism that has a poor view of who the indigenous people are," he said.

"We need to look towards the substantial contribution Aboriginal Australians can make and have made towards this nation."

The difference between Australia in 1997 and now, he said, was that an introspective nation now realised it was more closely linked to the rest of the world, through globalisation, climate change and economic problems.

He conceded that reconciliation needed to take place within Aboriginal communities — Warren Mundine criticised him last week as outdated — as well as with non-indigenous Australians.

South Africa could have blown itself apart if Nelson Mandela and other leaders had not risen above their prejudices to create a new republic, he said.